Victoria Hannan’s début novel was the winner of the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Awards of this kind, or a place on their shortlists, are practically de rigueur these days for any hopeful newcomer, as publishing opportunities shrink and the industry becomes ever more conservative and cautious. The judges picked well: Kokomo is a fine début, a wry romantic comedy with both literary and popular appeal.

The title comes from the Beach Boys serenade about a tropical island paradise. The singer invites his ‘pretty mama’ to get away from it all with him, so they can fall in love and perfect their chemistry. At one point, Mina’s ex sings the song at a karaoke bar and there are comments from various characters about how Kokomo isn’t a tropical island at all, it’s a city in Indiana, and certainly not a place you’d want to escape to.

Kokomo stands for that elusive and illusionary thing called love, and as the novel unfolds the certainty of that first sentence is undermined at every turn. Hannan is writing about love in the context of female longing and yearning for a place that can’t be reached, a sense of something missing that can’t be found but that doesn’t stop you trying. It might be a sense of early creative ambitions unfulfilled or of someone else having a better life than you, but more often it’s a romantic need. Usually, but not always, that something missing is man-shaped.

The two main characters experiencing this longing are Mina and her widowed mother, Elaine. For most of the story we are in Mina’s head, a messy place reminiscent of Bridget Jones’s Diary, with the comedy turned down a notch or two and the pathos turned up. At thirty-two, Mina is an up-and-coming hotshot in a London advertising agency, earning good money and ripe for promotion (Hannan’s experience as a creative director has been useful here). But behind the successful façade chaos is brewing.

When she puts her passion for workmate Jack on hold to return to her home town, Mina finds Elaine passive and uncommunicative, totally unable to explain why she has suddenly left the house after twelve years. It was Mina’s inability to deal with Elaine's apparently all-consuming agoraphobia, rather than her own ambition, that finally sent her to London, and all her ghosts are waiting to greet her on her return.

It’s not just romantic or parental love that eludes Mina: everything is always slightly, maddeningly out of reach. Over the road is the Cheng family, who have made a warm loving home while her own house stays chilly. Her best friend from school, Kira Cheng, is impossibly beautiful; her other friend, Shelly, is set up in a picture-perfect designer home with an adoring husband and adorable twin boys (Hannan has a sly and funny way of describing their adorable awfulness).

It is not always possible to like needy Mina as she drifts around, frantically scrolling to find affirmation on her phone, envying her friends, getting wasted and getting high, and expressing all her petulant self-pity, but Hannan keep us onside with keen observation and sharp humour.

At a bit past the halfway mark, we slip into Elaine’s point of view and discover the reason for her reticence. I don’t want to reveal too much; suffice to say she has been chasing that elusive thing in an entirely different way from her daughter. The vivid Elaine scenes have a tenderness, power, and urgency that made me sit up and take notice.

One of Hannan’s strengths as a writer is the words she finds to describe this existential female longing in terms of the body and the domestic. Mina longs to be filled up. On Jack: ‘She’d let him open her up and put his whole body inside her body, to move around and live inside her if that’s what he wanted.’ On love: ‘She wanted to be taken apart and put back together, a kettle filled, boiled, emptied and refilled again.’

Hannan’s female characters are strongly drawn, including Kira’s mother, Valerie, a force of nature who gives Mina the intimacy she can’t get elsewhere. By comparison, Hannan’s male characters are not observed so closely, but that fits the point of view that regards men as love objects who may be infinitely desirable and infinitely disappointing.

Sometimes novels of this kind take the easy way out with a feel-good ending. Kokomo isn’t tragic, but neither does it pander to the happily-ever-after brigade. Mina becomes less silly and more understanding, but the secrets revealed won’t solve anything and love is still a mystery that really doesn’t fill you up. You just take it on its own terms, and with luck you also learn to give.

One of Mina’s early ambitions, never fulfilled, was to ditch the advertising agency and write a novel. In a sense, Victoria Hannan has done it for her.